Recent years have seen an increasing development of technologies such as Software as a Service (SaaS), cloud computing, etc. This development is fueled by a growing customer demand for products and services based on these types of technologies. This development is also fueled by constant progresses in underlying technologies, such as processing power increase for microprocessors, storage capacity increase for storage devices, and transmission capacity improvements for networking equipment. Furthermore, the average cost of these underlying technologies is falling. However, the decrease in the average cost of the underlying technologies is balanced by the increased customer demand, which requires to constantly update and upgrade the infrastructures used for providing SaaS or cloud computing.
The infrastructure used for providing SaaS or cloud computing is a data center, which combines a very large number of computing servers. Each server has a plurality of multi-core processors, and the combination of the computing servers provides a very high processing capacity, which is used by customers of the data center. Some or all of the servers may also have important storage capacities, so that the combination of the servers also provides a very high storage capacity to the customers of the data center. The data center also relies on a networking infrastructure, for interconnecting the servers and providing access to their computing and/or storage capacity to the customers of the data center. In order to provide a reliable service, very strong requirements in terms of scalability, manageability, fault-tolerance, etc., are imposed on the computing and networking infrastructure of the data center.
With respect to the networking infrastructure of the data center, it is well known that providing efficient and reliable networking services to a very large number of hosts is a complex task. Solutions and technologies have been developed in other contexts, such as networking technologies for providing mobile data services to a very large number of mobile devices. Some of these technologies have been standardized in dedicated instances, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF®) or the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP™). However, at least some of the technological challenges of deploying an efficient and reliable networking infrastructure in a data center are specific to the data center context; and need to be addressed with original solutions and technologies.
One substantial challenge with respect to a networking infrastructure involving a large number (e.g. tens of thousands) of devices is the configuration of the networking infrastructure. In particular, the configuration needs to be flexible (to facilitate changes to an initial configuration), resiliant (to avoid that a localized configuration error affects operations of the whole data center) and secure (to prevent attacks on the networking infrastructure). One way to ensure that the network configuration is flexible and reliable is to limit as much as possible human intervention in the configuration process.
The networking infrastructure of a data center relies on one or more fabric. Each fabric comprises a plurality of networking equipment providing internal and external networking capabilities to computing servers of the data center.
Therefore, there is a need for a computing device and method for performing a fabric deployment in a data center, the fabric deployment comprising various network configurations.